Régis Identifies the Missing Twin Cameo in Paris

Régis Identifies the Missing Twin Cameo in Paris marks a decisive turn in Régis’s decades-long inquiry into the Founder’s origins. At a private Paris exhibition in May 1996, he recognized that the damaged cameo preserved by his family corresponded to one of a pair associated with the collection of the Regent. The discovery established a significant European provenance for the jewel, but it did not settle how the Founder had come to possess it. The distinction between identifying the object and tracing its journey would continue to shape the mystery.

An Investigation Stalled

Régis had begun researching the cameo in the 1940s, when his first examination suggested that it was European and had belonged to an aristocratic family. Its scratched surface, however, obscured the engraved figure, making it difficult to decide whether the image represented a mythological being or a real person. Under a magnifying glass, details of possible attributes, clothing, and style offered clues, but not a definitive identification.

He pursued the problem systematically, studying lapidary art and consulting specialists during trips to Europe. Presenting himself as an enthusiast rather than revealing that the object belonged to his family, he learned that its workmanship appeared Italian and that it dated at least to the eighteenth century, perhaps the seventeenth. The figure, he concluded, was likely Castor or Pollux; if so, the cameo should have had a twin.

In the 1960s, Régis searched the Bibliothèque nationale de France for written records. An eighteenth-century catalogue briefly listed a pair of cameos depicting Castor and Pollux in the collection of the Duke of Orléans, later the Regent. The catalogue offered no account of what happened to them afterward. The royal inventory made during the Revolution did not list the pair, and Régis could only speculate that the jewels had passed to relatives of Louis XVI or to another aristocratic family in exile. The records suggested a possible origin, not a chain of ownership.

By 1996, the search had made little progress, and Régis was close to abandoning it. A trip to France for a meeting of Francophone parliamentarians unexpectedly brought him back to the question. There he met Victor Bourdieu, a French senator and former industrialist. Their conversation ranged from steam locomotives and the philosophy of machines to engraved gemstones. Régis described, without naming the Founder or identifying his family, an old cameo he had once been asked to assess in Canada. He said he had consulted books, libraries, and old catalogues in France and Italy, but could not establish whether the jewel was an authentic original or an imitation.

The Paris Exhibition

Bourdieu told Régis that Christie’s would hold an auction of antique jewelry the next day, accompanied by a private exhibition of old engraved stones. The event drew on private collections and museums in France and elsewhere in Europe; its audience was restricted, largely to European aristocratic circles. Bourdieu offered to bring him. Régis accepted, sensing that the invitation might set something important in motion.

Among the cases and photographs of cameos whose whereabouts had been lost, Régis saw an image of a stone that resembled his family’s jewel. Beside it was an old engraving of a supposedly missing cameo. The engraving showed the Founder’s cameo as it had appeared before the scratch that now marked the family object. Recognition came through the juxtaposition: the exhibition’s images connected the damaged heirloom to a documented pair, rather than merely resembling it in general style.

The pair’s iconography made the relationship clearer. The two Dioscuri stood facing one another; each held a horse by the bridle and carried a lance, and each wore an egg-shaped cap topped with a star. The exhibition record described the stones as five-layered onyx with a dark upper layer. It also stated that the pair had belonged to the Regent’s collection before being separated after the Revolution. One had entered the private collection of an unnamed family from the old French aristocracy. The other, the cameo of Castor, had disappeared under unknown circumstances, probably amid the revolutionary upheaval.

The exhibition did not identify the owners of the surviving twin or explain the missing stone’s later travels. Still, the evidence allowed Régis to recognize the Founder’s jewel as the lost member of the pair. The find established its connection to the Regent’s collection and strengthened the case for an aristocratic French provenance. It did not prove how the cameo crossed the Atlantic, who had carried it, or whether every stage of its history had been lawful.

Recognition and Caution

Régis tried not to disclose the full significance of what he had seen to Bourdieu. When the senator noticed his reaction, Régis cautiously said that the displayed image reminded him of the Canadian cameo and that he had wondered whether its figure might be one of the mythological twins. He immediately qualified his claim, insisting that he could not be sure of what he had seen, or even trust his memory. His reserve reflected the gap between recognizing a likeness and proving the object’s identity and history.

The written account of the meeting, which Loïc later read, records that Régis regretted having revealed as much as he had. He noted Bourdieu’s unusually keen interest and photographed the cameo identified as Pollux. The image became a concrete record of the encounter in his papers, alongside his account of the exhibition and its clues.

Régis’s diary entry dated May 10, 1996, makes his suspicion explicit. He considered Bourdieu too quick in business, too insistent about the cameo, and possibly interested in a profitable opportunity. The senator excused himself soon after leaving the exhibition, saying he had nearly forgotten another appointment. Régis did not know what, if anything, Bourdieu intended, but his notes preserve an early warning that the discovery had attracted more than scholarly attention.

What the Discovery Settled—and Left Open

On returning home, Régis told his brother, Georges, that the Paris exhibition had revealed a twin cameo in an unnamed aristocratic family’s collection. For the first time, the family had a strong basis for linking its jewel to the pair once owned by the Regent. Yet Georges maintained that this did not rule out the possibility that their ancestor had obtained it as wartime plunder during the American Civil War. He also left open the possibility that the D’Anjou family’s cameo was an imitation. The provenance in Paris therefore answered one question while sharpening another: the pair’s earlier history was becoming clearer, but the route from revolutionary-era Europe to the Founder remained unexplained.

The encounter also acquired a darker significance in Loïc’s later reconstruction. He inferred that Bourdieu passed the information to Charles de C..., a regional acquaintance and long-standing accomplice, who then had years to organize a scheme aimed at recovering the missing cameo. Régis himself never learned Charles’s name. The narrative thus makes the Paris recognition both a scholarly breakthrough and an inadvertent exposure: the images and photograph advanced the family’s investigation, while the interest they awakened helped set later events in motion.